1. The slogan "The world is our picket line" has been used by the Liverpool dockers' international campaign.2. Vision and hope cannot be found in dead things; therefore we cannot find vision and hope in computers, phone lines, and terminals spread around the world. Yet the role of information technology for the building of networks of struggle is increasingly recognized in its importance, and rightly so. Information is quickly distributed around the world, thus helping to mobilize campaigns, support, and pressure. This instrumental use of the Internet as a vehicle of circulation of propaganda and information is, of course, important but must be carefully qualified. Not only we must take into consideration the conditions of availability of such technology (much more limited in the South than in the North). Also, the political, cultural, and aspirational differences, as well the difference in needs expressed by different movements around the world may become an obstacle to mutual understanding and mutual support, and can even lead to clashing demands (for example, the demand of employment growth may clash with the demand for respect for the environment or indigenous autonomy; the demand for human rights may clash with demands for saving jobs in the industrial sector suppling the military; etc.). Thus it has been argued that "the Net provides new spaces for new political discussions about democracy, revolution and self-determination but it does not provide solutions to the differences that exist; it is merely a means to accelerate the search for such solutions." (Cleaver 1996/97: 5)
3. "We don't have words. We don't have face. We don't have name. We don't have tomorrow. We do not exist.... For power, what today is known in the world with the name of 'neoliberalism', we do not count, we do not produce, we do not buy, we do not sell. We were a useless number for the accounting of big capital." -- Mayor Ana Maria (1996: 23).
4. Examples of this blurring of distinction are provided by the wave of anti-NAFTA struggles in the few years before 1994; the emerging coalitions against social exclusion and unemployment in Europe; the mushrooming of committees organizing (and in so doing, learning and practicing direct democracy) the first and Second Intercontinental Meetings for Humanity and against Neoliberalism, etc. On the labour front, Brecher and Costello (1994: 160) report that the organizing of the new labour activism is based on practices such as (a) worker-to-worker exchange; (b) cross-border organizing; (c) labor-rights; (d) international strike support; (e) global labour communication (Internet, etc.). "LabourNet also ties into other 'nets' dedicated to social movements like the environmental movement, peace movement, and human rights movement. Labor communication expert Peter Waterman has suggested that the increasing use of computers by labour and social movements constitutes a 'communications internationalism', which he dubs a 'Fifth International'. Also in this case, the blurring of the distinction between the national and the international is evident in the practice of the movement itself. See also note 14.
5. See the Liverpool Dockers' site for documented information about their dispute: <http://www.gn.apc.org/labournet/docks>.
6. See, for example, the project of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the Poor People's Embassy in the United States. In their Call for Testimony and Documentation, they write: "WELFARE CUTS = HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in 1948, guarantees every man, woman and child the right to housing, food, education, health care and living wage jobs. Recent federal and state welfare reforms in the United States violate these rights. People who have been receiving public relief are told to "get a job" while millions of unemployed and under-employed people can't find jobs. With the new welfare laws, those who cannot find a job are no longer guaranteed the right to food, housing, clothing and health care. As a result of this, more and more people are unable to feed, house and clothe their families." They also take a stand on what they believe it is a human rights ground, and poor families from the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in Philadelphia marched at the end of June 1997 from the Liberty Bell to the UN: "With this historic march, we will expose the inhumane conditions in which we are forced to live, and we will insist on our right to live." Kensington Welfare Rights Union: <http://www.libertynet.org/~kwru>; E-mail <mailto:kwru@libertynet.org>.
7. Brecher and Costello (1994: 150) note: "Curiously enough, the architects of American labor's foreign policy during the Cold War regarded themselves as internationalists -- anti-communist internationalists. They cooperated closely with the CIA to break left-led strikes (for example in France in 1949) and overthrow leftist governments (for example in Guatemala in 1954). Business Week described the AFL-CIO's global operations, such as its International Affairs Department in Washington and its American Institute for Free Labor Development in Latin America, as 'labor's own version of the Central Intelligence Agency -- a trade union network existing in all parts of the world.'" (150) In 1988, still most of the AFL-CIO budget in overseas activity comes from the US government (1988 data). The collusion of AFL-CIO with US foreign policy was mocked by American grassroots militants by calling the union organization the "AFL-CIA"
8. It is remarkable that almost thirty years ago, the Italian Marxist Mario Tronti could anticipate so clearly this process and write: "... the new international ... will no longer be the international of the parties, but of the class, first of all an international of workers' struggles. It is therefore no longer an ideal for which to fight, nor an organ of the leadership that attempts to convince workers to fight for the ideal, but a simple political fact, an organizational need that comes from below, as struggles come from below, and that meet a international strategy of these struggles that comes from above. We must understand that the international dimension of the class struggle is a fact that is imposed on us by capital's world development." (Tronti 1968: 525-526)
9. For a background analysis of the economic and social conditions of life in Chiapas, see, for example, Subcommandante Marcos (1992) and Ceceña & Barreda (1995).
10. However, when people are separated, a community is only illusory: such as the state, the city, and the neighborhood.
11. In the occasion of Britain's last general election, the Independent opened with this quotation from J.-J. Rousseau: "The English people believes itself to be free: it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of MPs; as soon as the Members are elected the people are enslaved".
12. For a background analysis of the relation between neoliberal forces and Mexican agriculture see Gates (1996).
13. As prime facie evidence of this assertion, suffice it to say that the first communiqué addressed also to the "people and government of the world" dates 6 of Juanuary 1996, that is only six days into the revolution. Thereafter, all communiqué carry the same address.
14. Incidentally, the Zapatistas' continuous reference to the "Nation" can, for example, be understood in at least three directions. First, in term of the reference to the "ideal", to the "whole" that the indigenous communities ought to be part of. They can be part of the whole, only to the extent they are in condition to determine themselves, a condition that is negated in the very moment the "whole" is kept together by means of an external things (money, the police force, etc.). Thus, the invisibility of the indigenous community (and for that matter, the invisibility of any single minority cosntituting the majority of us) is the result of its being separated from the whole, or from being connected to the whole in an inorganic way, as a "cog in the machine". Their claim to visibility, is a claim for the establishment of an organic link (nothing for us, everything for everybody). The Zapatistas refer to this organic unity as "nation", Marx calles it "Res Publica", or True Democracy, or Communism, but they all mean the same thing; people recognize each other as human beings and therefore govern themselves. Second, what they call "nation" often is not defined by national borders or racial characteristics, but more in terms of subversive affinity. An imagery that is continuously repeated is the one that regards everybody in the world sharing their struggles and visions, as carrying a bit of Mexico in their heart. The use of the discourse around the nation acquires also a third meaning. The government can claim legitimacy to the extent it is able to present an image of itself as the institution protecting the general interest versus particular interests. The Zapatistas' use of the nation's rhetoric challenges this fundamental means of legitimation. But for them, the general interest is that of humanity, not of capital.
15. This means essentially that interdependency expresses itself as a power external to the individuals, instead of these individuals expressing their human powers through their interdependency.
16. Similar to this conception is the concept of globalization as capital's strategy (De Angelis 1997).
17. The two approaches, of course, do not exclude each other. The first tale of Don Durito, the beetle used by Marcos as subject of his more analytical narratives, met Marcos while sitting in front of "a small typewriter, reading some papers and smoking a diminutive pipe". Marcos asked him what he was studing, and Don Durito replied : "I'm studying neoliberalism and its strategy of domination for Latin America" (Zapatistas: 274, my emphasis). An example of this strategic reading of capital's strategy is in Marcos's recent theses on globalization, which I cannot critically review here (Marcos 1997).
18. This reflection of society into the market and vice versa is most evident in the original discourse of classical Political Economy. In his Wealth of Nations Adam Smith talks about civil society as "commercial society", that is, the set of isolated, atomized individuals pursuing their self-interest.
19. For a detailed analysis of the role played by dignity in the Zaptistas, see John Holloway (1997).
20. Within the constraints of capitalist accumulation, a citizen can express her self-value to the extent she negates herself, she accepts abuses without screaming on the job or while talking to the dole officers, she does her job professionally or accepts her role as job-searcher.
21. "Marcos is gay in San Francisco, a black person in South Africa, Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Isidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, an Indigenous person in the streets of San Cristóbal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker on [University] campus, a Jew in Germany, an ombudsman in the Department of Defense (Secretaria de Defensa, Sedena), a feminist in a political party, a communist in the post-Cold War period, a prisoner in Cintalapa, a pacifist in Bosnia, a Mapuche in the Andes, a teacher in National Confederation of Educational Workers (Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores de Educación, CNTE), an artist without a gallery or a portfolio, a housewife in any neighborhood in any city in any part of Mexico on a Saturday night, a guerrilla in Mexico at the end of the twentieth century, a striker in the CTM, a sexist in the feminist movement, a woman alone in a Metro station at 10 p.m., a retired person standing around in the Zócalo, a campesino without land, an underground editor, an unemployed worker, a doctor with no office, a non-conformist student, a dissident against neoliberalism, a writer without books or readers, and a Zapatista in the Mexican Southeast. In other words, Marcos is a human being in this world. Marcos is every untolerated, oppressed, exploited minority that is resisting and saying, "Enough!"" (Zapatistas!: 310-311). See also Mayor Ana Maria (1996: 25-26.)
22. In his excellent study on Gilles Deleuze, Michael Hardt (1993) deals with Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson in relation to the contraposition between what is virtual and what is possible. The essential point is that what is virtual is real, while what is possible is not real. Deleuze's point is, therefore, that the movement of being must be understood in terms of a relation virtual-actual, rather then of the relation possible-real. The movement of "actualization" of what is virtual is always a creative movement, while the movement of "realization" of what is possible is not creative, being this pre-determined by the definition of what is possible.
23. See for example Ilene Grabel (1997: 5).
24. For an opposite view on needs, see Doyal and Gough (1991).
25. In an interview to the newspaper La Jornada on the day of the uprising (1 January 1994) and published only on 18 January , Marcos said: "We have dignity ... and we are demonstrating it. You should do the same, within your ideology, within your means, within your beliefs, and make your human condition count" (Zapatistas!: 63).
26. "Zapata's determined gaze and slighly stooped shoulders in the well loved photograph paraded by the 'cobas' of Alfa Romeo workers at Arese in Milan was one of the striking journalistic images of 1994, creating a bridge in real time between the Mexican revolt in January and the struggles of Europe's industrial workers and unemployed. A bridge was thrown through space and historical time to link struggles against continued 'primitive' exprorpiation of the land to those against the post-Fordist expropriation of labour that brings with it the progressive dismantlement of the public system of social rights and guarantees" (Dalla Costa 1995: 11).
27. For an account of the European meeting, see De Angelis (1996).
28. A part for the logistic and general management, this is mostly true for the first Encuentro, while for the second this is true only in specific cases (such as the occupied farm of El Indiano), as many structures where borrowed from public administration. For the first Encuentro, someone said that about 50,000 people were responsible for the organization of the event, during the previous few months. Huts to host computer centres and shops, large posadas (long huts in which dozens of hammocks could be slung), lines of showers and toilets, steps, footpaths and drainages ditches, canteens, kitchens and press centres, all had to be built or re-developed to host more than 3,000 foreign delegates from 44 nations and 5 continents, 700 Mexican delegates and 500 journalists, that is, nearly 5,000 people that needed to be fed, sleep in a dry place, and who produced a corresponding amount of rubbish, defecation, and urine that needed to be disposed of in the most appropriate way. All this in five aguascalientes -- the name of the places were the meetings were held -- spread around the Zapatistas' held territory, the Lacandona jungle, in the rainy season! Then hundreds of coaches to take the delegates across the region needed to be organized; then the provision of food, drinkable water, energy. Because in the jungle there is no electricity, the water needed to be fetched from rivers and purified, and food had to be brought with trucks crossing the government army's lines. When, at the end of the Encuentro, it was announced that the next international meeting was to be held in Europe, the European delegates shivered. Will the people in Rome, Paris, or Barcelona take the responsibility? (Not certainly those in Great Britain, country that produced only 3 delegates, compared to 35 of Small Switzerland, 250 of Italy, or 400 of Spain). It was at that point, when we started to put ourselves in their shoes, that it became absolutely clear the enormous amount of organizational effort involved. I am emphasizing the organizational aspect of the Encuentro because it is a demonstration of what the collective effort of human beings can produce. It was right Marcos to say that this was a crazy idea, it was definitely a crazy "desire". But as French filosopher Gilles Deleuze said, desire is production of reality. The reality was produced at Realidad, the place in Zapatistas' territory where the Encuentro was concluded.
Let's make a small calculation, imagining -- only for a moment -- the Encuentro was the business enterprise that was not. Each of the foreign delegates was asked to pay 100 dollars for the week-long event. Including the contribution of the Mexican delegates and the journalists, the total amounted to about $400,000. According to the newspaper La Journada, at the end of the meeting, the Encuentro left the Zapatistas about $30,000 in deficit. The money received by the organizers thus paid mostly for the long (and, as I was told very, expensive) bus journeys across the jungle and for food (while the provision of wood came from the surrounding rain forest), that is, for the provision of raw material from the market economy. This means that a part from the transportation that was mostly purchased from the market economy, the greatest part of the processing of these input-goods was beyond the market economy, were de-monetized, were the product of a huge effort of the indigenous direct social co-operation of labour. Most of what we ate, drank, used for our daily basic needs (sleeping places, showers, toilets, computer rooms, etc.), did not have any monetized "value added", but a "human value", not the offer of a service to costumers, but the provision of necessities to fellow human beings, not the exchange of values, but the value of human exchange.
29. Yes, there were many organizational problems. That moderator tended to be authoritarian. The other was not able to face the authoritarian tendencies of some of the participants pressing for their positions. Some participant was intimidated by the large size of some groups. Some felt put off by the at times endless list of ponencias that appeared to reduce the interchange, the discussion, the confrontation among people. These and other problems are real, but can only be seen as problems to be solved and not as the overall character defining the Encuentro. The Encuentro did not begin in July 1996 or end in August 1997. The Encuentro is a process.
